Feistein Defends NSA, Trashes Snowden

Dear Senator Feinstein,

Your letter today defending the NSA and its surveillance programs is as unconvincing and wrong-headed as your letters of August 8 and 15 which also defended them. You repeat the claim that “these NSA programs are effective and have contributed to the disruption of more than 50 terrorist plots and arrests on charges of terrorism” in spite of the fact that this has been discredited repeatedly, most recently in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on July 31—the same day your op-ed appeared in the Washington Post defending the NSA and mongering fear about terrorists and how “New bombs and techniques are in the making” and we must stay on alert. Today’s NYT (“Top Secret Court Castigated NSA On Surveillance” p. A1) reports that former chief judge of the FISC, John Bates, ruled in 2011 that the NSA consistently and systematically collected and analyzed Americans’ communications without a warrant in violation of the Constitution and that there was “a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials in submissions to the secret court.” The current chief judge recently said that the secret court is totally dependent on the information NSA gives it and is ill-equipped to provide adequate oversight. It’s clear also that Congress is not protecting We the People or the Constitution from assault by the intelligence community; indeed, both the House and Senate committee chairs are in lock-step with the agencies, their fiercest defenders. In your letter today: “Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower, and I stand by my previous comments that his actions have caused serious harm to our nation's counterterrorism and intelligence gathering efforts.” I maintain that Edward Snowden is far more concerned with democracy and the nation’s security than you or Rogers or any of the other destroyers of democracy. Our security will never be won at the point of a gun or a Hellfire missile or by Special Forces kicking down doors in the dead of night or drones circling villages in the mountains and valleys of Pakistan and Yemen and Afghanistan. Security will only come when our leaders ask, Why do they hate us? and go beyond the simpleton Bush response: Because they hate freedom. When we respect them and their culture, treat them as fellow human beings, when we stop invading and spreading violence and terror, when we stop despoiling their lands and stealing their resources, supporting and arming autocrats who repress them, only then will we be secure and live in peace.